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Thursday, October 29, 2009

Deep Purple

Have I got a surprise for you. Yep, I have a picture...oh, wait...I have two pictures. I know, I know, you can hardly contain your excitement. The first here is my slave bracelet pattern made with my brand spanking new hand dyed thread I've been speaking of. Now, I'm not normally a fan of variegation in thread. I'm a solid colors sort of gal, so the offer of hand dyed thread made me a little leery over those "natural" color variations. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked the subtle color variation with this thread. It seems to give the piece and depth rather than the rainbow color effect that I am not so fond of.

I was going to start a brand new design with the new thread as well, but as I also mentioned, it's way more costly than the off the rack thread. I decided rather than fair an experiment with it, that I would bust out the good old black thread to work out a new design. This one was prompted by a comment by Kersti...the tatting queen. She said arm band on twitter when I asked what I should make. I thought it would be easy after a sample of arm sizes also from my twitter friends, but the design proved elusive. I wanted a little, you know luxe, fancy, indulgent, but I couldn't settle on an elaborate thick design or a thin band. Of course there's also the question of how to close the piece so that's it's easy to wear.

What I finally did was settle on a pattern. After combing through vintage books for inspiration, I found a frankly horrible looking edging with potential. How anyone wants to tat with stretched out, uneven images like this beckoning them is really beyond me. I took the basic design and tweaked it a bit for a much more stable and less stretchy structure and yes I am adding the fringe. I think I am going to fringe every other motif rather than all of them, but I'm still in the planning stages here. I also noted that many of the fiber based arm bands currently for sale are marketed as convertible pieces, meaning that you can wear them multiple ways, as necklaces or bracelets for example. This led me to an idea for a ribbon closure idea that may have the ribbon running the length of the design. Again, planning stages, so it could go either way.

8 comments:

I completely agree with your comment about old wonky looking pattern photos. I think every old tatting book I have has horrible photos. Seems like I spend just as much time decifering the pattern as I do trying to figure out what it will look like as a solid even piece.Awesome job on the slave bracelet. I love the deep purple colors.

Now see...I LIKE brightly colored variegateds, but mostly for embroidery. I too prefer more subtle variations (or none at all) for things like crocheted lace, tatting, etc. The only time I tend to use bright colors with those types of lace is when I'm learning and I need to see where the threads go. I really like the bracelet you did.

Old embroidery books are sometimes a horror as well, and if they used colors but the photo is in black and white, sometimes you have no idea what you're looking at. Drawn thread in particular has some bizarre stretching and awful photography. It's almost like they hated the craft. It's really nice to pull things out though and work with them to make them more tolerable/contemporary.